


Copycat

by apiphile



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Depressing, Metaphor, Other, Violence, alien possession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-09
Updated: 2010-03-09
Packaged: 2017-10-07 20:23:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,369
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/68902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Something takes over Ianto.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Copycat

The clouds lay bruise-dark and slate-blue in thick blankets, piled duvets, some arbitrary and wind-defined distance above the city lights, their flat bottoms crowding against each other and allowing only occasional glimpses of the dusk sky above, like a stained-glass window made almost wholly of lead guttering. Below them on the empty pavement a solitary figure moved at a brisk walk among the fallen leaves, his black woolen coat drawn around his midriff more like a guard than a garment.

Ianto Jones fucking hated London.

He used to love the place, because it was new and shiny and bright and after twenty years of living in Cardiff something _else_ was a wonderful and refreshing adventure. And then … then there was Canary Wharf, and now Ianto Jones fucking hated London and part of him was seething with wounded rage – a very buried, suffocated part – that he had to come back here.

He had spent most of the day on Saville Row, looking up his father's former friends – or, more often, the families of his father's former friends – and after some deliberation and checking his bank balance had purchased an extremely fine indigo silk tie. Ianto had never intended to spend so long in the city he loathed and had originally held a ticket for a much later train, but circumstances had conspired to make him leave Cardiff earlier in the day.

"Circumstances" being the prodigious row that had broken out between Owen and Gwen shortly after Gwen had arrived that morning; one of the truly interminable vicious wrangles the two of them were engaging in with depressing frequency in Jack's unexplained absence. When Tosh had said something about building a fall-out shelter to escape from all of the bad feeling Ianto couldn't be sure whether she was joking or not – the smiling faces on her emails were more of a tic than an emotional indicator at the best of times and he was pretty certain she contained depths the rest of them were never going to plumb.

The road ran through an area of North London which was, even to Ianto's bile-tinted shades, a pleasant one. He could hear sirens, one always could in this _bloody_ city, but they were distant enough to be nothing but ambient London.

Ianto brushed a late-dripping raindrop from his cheek absently and froze as his hand came away smeared in black. He looked around at the pavement, speckled with a Dalmatian-coat of inky spots with scalloped edges.

A sullen breeze slapped the tree above him and set the branches rubbing and groaning against each other, the remaining leaves spitting down a fresh, short hail of black gobbets.

Ianto looked up. It was here, then, half a mile south of where the positioning system had placed it; when he got back to the Hub there would be a few nights spent recalibrating the fucking thing and at least ten minutes of severe scolding for Owen and Owen's careless disposal of muffin casing, if this was anything like last time. Ianto stuffed his hands in his pea coat pockets and craned his neck back.

The alien was an indistinct dark blob, cradled among drooping-but-strong boughs like a child in the arms of a fireman, and dripping gently onto the leaves, pavement and trunk apparently unceasing cascade of oily viscera, ichor, or blood. Ianto squinted but could not yet make out a form – it was on the wrong side of the streetlight's obliterating artificial amber glow, and it looked stuck fast.

He sighed, and, getting a good grip on the trunk of the tree, began to climb.

A car whooshed past, oblivious, and Ianto caught his shoe on the underside of a knot in the bark. The tree's branches trembled again in a shuddering whip of wind, dislodging more of the glop – there was a streak of it in front of Ianto's face, on the free, and another splat landed squarely down the back of his neck, inside his shirt collar.

"_Yuck_," Ianto muttered, and, "I've only worn this one twice, for God's sake."

The caprices of the fates have no respect for good tailoring, however, and before he'd climbed more than a few inches more Ianto noted gloomily that his cuff now also bore the stain. The shape – Ianto stretched and squinted – remained frozen but unidentifiable. Even an assessment of general size or number of limbs proved impossible. Maybe he'd have to skip bollocking Owen's slatternly habits in favour of an eye test.

Somewhere in the gardens to the left of the pavement, maybe behind the houses, a fox sent up the ghostly coughing scream of a vixen in heat: _ko, ko, ko_.

"If I didn't know better I'd think you were laughing," Ianto grumbled. He caught and scraped the outer side of his right hand on a rough-cut branch stump, and another blob of the mercifully scentless goo hit him with a firm splat on the forehead, directly between the eyes.

_Ro ko ro ko_, shrieked the vixen.

A dribble of the black stuff had apparently got under his cuff, too, because he could feel it trickling up his forearm as he reached up for the first of the wide horizontal branches to haul his weight up. Ianto tried to get his breath; he'd been a moderately good tree-climber a mere fifteen or twenty years ago, but then he hadn't been wearing a suit _most_ of those times.

Muggy sweat swamped his forehead and dried cold in the autumn air as Ianto struggled up onto the branch and steadied himself with an uneasy hand. These were no shoes for climbing. It was madness to be up here – a drop landed on his lower lip.

"_Ugh_ \- " Ianto swiped at it, trying not to upset his precarious balance on the slippery bough. "Fuck."

_Ko ko ko_, the vixen insisted, from further away.

He reached up for the next branch. The tree seemed to stretch on forever into the night, a world at the end of each branch, an infinite cold waiting beneath him should he fall; Ianto looked up to check the position of the formless dark that hung in the arms of the tree. It had not so much as shifted or even fluttered in the gusts; a drip went up his nose.

"GYAH!" He tried to sneeze it out and so doing nearly lost his balance, the stiff soles of his shoes sliding over the fishlike bark with alarming ease – flinging his arm out to grab the trunk saved his equilibrium but covered his hand in the dark slime. It felt of _nothing_ \- he knew it was wet, because it dripped, and only liquids did that, but there was no sensation of wetness on his soiled fingers. It was evidently the same temperature as he, because there was no warmth, no coolness, to his hand. As coincidences went that was fairly huge.

Ianto struggled up onto the next branch. He was past the light now, and should have had a clear view of the alien body; instead here there was nothing more than a concentrated darkness through which he could see nothing. It hurt to look at – like poking a raw nerve or staring directly into the sun, only instead of overwhelming brightness there was nothing but this punishing black, sucking at his eyeballs like a vacuum in the world, until he shook his head sharply and a drip splashed the inside of his ear.

He began to feel a little afraid as well as absurd. Standing fifteen, twenty feet above the hard pavement in shoes that were designed for flat surfaces, light drizzle coaxing his hair into frizz, some unknown substance trickling along several parts of his body where he could not easily wipe it away, Ianto felt that perhaps what he _should_ have done was to just radio back to the Hub (they _must_ have finished fighting by now) and let them know he needed back-up, possibly from Torchwood 0.5 if he'd finished being grounded yet. He was after all closest, ensconced in Peckham.

"Too late now," Ianto muttered, though it manifestly _wasn't_. All the same, he stretched upwards for the branch that held – as far as he could tell – the bulk of the alien's corpse. Ianto hooked his palm over the smooth grey bark – the branch was wide, and higher up than he anticipated. He went up onto the balls of his feet and, releasing the broad trunk, swung his black-stained hand up to grip from the other side, from above, fingers touching fingers. As he began to lift, several things happened at once:

The vixen gave an unexpected invitation, sounding as if she were directly below the tree.

Ianto's highly unsuitable smart shoes slipped in opposite directions.

And – just as Ianto was sure he was about to end up hitting himself in the bollocks very, very _hard_ as he landed on the branch crotch-first – another drip fell from his _hand_ into his open mouth.

His palm slipped, his fingernails (always so neatly clipped and so pinkly clean) tore uselessly at the featureless grey bark, and, almost wrenching his remaining arm out of his socket, he lost his place on the branch entirely, and fell.

His head hit the branch he'd been standing on squarely at the back, and Ianto lost consciousness.

At first he fell like a leaden ragdoll or a heavy drunk, but ten feet above the ground he twisted like a cat and landed in a crouch, his fingertips and toes hitting the pavement with a curious lightness of impact.

Ianto opened his eyes and straightened his tie with clean, pinks hands, as he straightened up. He brushed dust from his trousers, and smiled an approving smile.

Inside, he thought, _how the fuck did I manage that? My head doesn't even hurt_, and tried to look back at where he'd fallen from.

His head remained where it was, looking out at the increased flow of traffic on the road.

"_Fuck_," Ianto said. Nothing came out. His lips remained in their approving, soft-sided smile. _Fuck fuck fuck fucking fucking FUCK – _ it was a word that got a _lot_ of use in Ianto's head anyway but it was _staying_ in his head now despite his best efforts. Not a fractional twitch at the corners of his mouth betrayed his inner yells of _HEY!_ and _what the hell is going on?_

_Radio the others_, Ianto told himself, but it proved unnecessary: there was a sharp beep in his ear, and Gwen's voice was loud in its aftermath.

"How did it go?" she asked, "you've been gone ages. Did you find it? Was it where it was mapped to be? What are we dealing with here? Was it a false alarm? Are you okay – Owen, piss off – are you okay?"

"Okay," Ianto's voice said calmly. He could hardly believe it, he hadn't intended to say a word and there his mouth was, moving all on its own. "False alarm."

"Good. Tosh is working on the settings at the moment. Might as well head back, eh? Long week ahead of us – oh! Jack's due back soon – we got a message." Gwen signed off with her usual disjointed collection of information. "Byeee!"

"Byeee," Ianto's mouth replied. After a silence of seconds that stretched away like an infinity, Ianto realised that despite the persistent gusts of night air, he was no longer feeling cold, and the graze on his hand had ceased to hurt. He would have been suspicious of such good fortune even had circumstances been normal – "there are no free rides" was a harsh lesson he'd learnt thoroughly – but as things stood, as he became aware that his legs were moving without him, back the way he'd come, Ianto felt a purely figurative chill overwhelm his consciousness. Someone or something had control of his body, and it wasn't the collection of thoughts he regarded as the core of Ianto Jones. Something had control of his body, and it wasn't _him_.

* * *

 

By the time the body of Ianto Jones, hair combed and shoes shined, entered Torchwood through the back entrance, it was past midnight. Separate from the sensations of his body as if a cord had been cut, Ianto's consciousness was not tired or hungry, though he could "hear" the rumblings and gurglings of his inner plumbing and the gripes of his belly more clearly than ever before.

The Hub was apparently deserted, the lights dipped and – Ianto caught a glimpse out of the corner of his own eye as his body strolled past, glancing around – someone had put a yellow post-it on one of his monitors. Which could really be _anything_ from "Key in this sequence or the computer will explode with a gas that will make you hallucinate you are made of living crab-hammers" (that had not been a fun afternoon) to "pizza is in the fridge, help yourself, but not to the pepperoni side because Owen is a dick and has licked that bit". At the Hub both eventualities were equally likely.

Ianto's body took a brief tour of the botanical lab. His brain briefly noted that some of the plants were wilting already; amazing, he was gone for one day, one fucking day and _someone_ with a medical degree had managed to break the automated sprinkler relay. Amazing.

It was only a short respite from his predicament – Ianto's body examined the plants with frustrating lentissimo, but soon enough it left, leaving the _bloody_ door open, and made for the kitchen. Ianto could hear a tuneful but aimless whistle from within, a mangling of "We'll Meet Again" that Jack particularly enjoyed tormenting the team with when _he'd_ finished work and _they_ hadn't.

His body swung the door open and leaned on it, propping it open with his hip. Ianto recognised the look on Jack's face immediately. _Oh no. NO. Help me! Come on! Surely you can tell there's something wrong!_ He shouted, but his mouth continued to smile quizzically and Jack raised his eyebrows in greeting.

"Just going to stand there, are you? Aren't you glad to see me?" he said in mock-indignation. He sounded playful, slightly lascivious – as if all was well, as if it were really Ianto standing there. As if he couldn't _see_ what had happened.

_Jack! NO! That's not me! That's – alright, it is me, but I'm not in control here - _

"Glad to see me?" Ianto's mouth said, as he quirked a single eyebrow back at the Captain.

"Like you wouldn't believe," Jack sighed, rolling his eyes. "My _god_ the Himalayas are boring. No one is going to be able to read _that_ report without falling asleep. I'm thinking about writing in pornographic haiku just to give my brain something to do without atrophying – " he broke off and fixed Ianto's eyes with his own, and inside Ianto tried to catch his attention any way he could.

_It's something else in control!_ Ianto yelled frantically, _Don't let it near you, Jack, do something! PLEASE HELP ME!_

" – never mind that now," Jack said, and kissed Ianto's mouth decisively.

From experience Ianto knew what Jack's mouth felt like – the way it usually shaped itself against his to send sparks to all the parts of him that were hind-brain controlled. He knew that Jack would have his rough-smooth fingers cupped over the tender skin behind Ianto's ear, and that their every minute movement would drive _his_ breaths to shallow sharp gulps. But his body had lowered the eyelids and all Ianto really knew for certain was that he was trapped here, inside his own flesh like a prisoner inside a darkened cell, and Jack _hadn't noticed_.

_NOT NOW FOR FUCK'S SAKE!_ Ianto screamed, _Jack, that's not me it's not me it's not me - _

Ianto's body returned the kiss with interest, his fingers splayed over Jack's shoulder, his spine curved against the kitchen wall. Ianto wondered how it knew to do that. Maybe this was his autopilot; he found the idea profoundly disturbing – had he really been going through the motions all this time?

Ianto's body let Jack slide his thigh between its own like a scouting party and half-twisted, still kissing as keenly as before, to allow him to fumble at the buttons of Ianto's shirt. Jack always _fumbled_. He had enough practice and dexterity to undo them tidily and deftly in seconds, but he always became clumsy in these situations. Until now Ianto had found it flattering, believing Jack to be so overcome by lust that he couldn't help himself.

Now, watching and listening from the inside like an independent observing body, the audience to his own life, Ianto couldn't help but wonder if it wasn't merely an affectation _intended_ to make him feel special among the multitudes, designed to inspire his loyalty. Perhaps this was just what Jack did: flirtation and emotion for Gwen, impossible goals for Owen, praise for Tosh, and _fucking_ for Ianto.

The sense of bitter shame almost threatened to overwhelm the by now entrenched panic. Ianto grappled for control of his own muscles, but there was nothing to grapple _with_. He had no idea how to go about getting hold of his motor neurons; everything was a mystery to him, and as he whispered _Jack, this isn't me you're kissing_, he almost wondered if the man knew already and just didn't care.

Jack had Ianto's shirt open to the navel, his jacket hanging off his shoulders and his tie loose but not yet undone, and he nuzzled and worried at Ianto's neck, chest and collarbone with the kind of insistent intensity that normally drove Ianto to incoherence and shaking thighs. He knew that his thighs _were_ trembling, but, trapped inside himself, Ianto couldn't feel it. He observed the scene with a hollow detachment and a sinking sense of despair, still half-expecting Jack to realise, to snap his head up while Ianto's thrown-back head still pointed at the ceiling and say, "you're an imposter".

But instead Jack breathed a jet of hot, moist breath over Ianto's throat and licked the line of his jaw with slow, deliberate strokes. Ianto's body bridled and twitched at the assault. Ianto's consciousness sighed in despair.

"I'm going to fuck you right _here_," Jack muttered, yanking Ianto's shirt and jacket down at once to tangle up his arms. This rough, impetuous bondage had originally been Ianto's own idea; his mind threw up an automatic _Surely that's not hygienic_ before he began a silent scream of _no, Jack, no! This thing might be able to cross between us by osmosis or something, it might transfer to you, it might be doing it right now – Jack – GET OFF – STOP - _

But all that came out of his mouth was an anticipatory whimper and a very playful, "Right … _here_." The intonation sounded more like Jack than himself; Ianto was sure that no matter how carried away he got (and, if memory served, he got fairly carried away) he never sounded _quite_ like that, quite that throaty and teasing. It wasn't his nature; Jack, however, sounded quite oblivious to this uncharacteristic change.

_Damn it, Jack_, Ianto growled, wishing to every god he didn't believe in that Jack was as observant of Ianto's Self as he'd assumed he was. But Jack had been oblivious to Ianto's close-guarded secrets before, and would probably remain so. Probably, Ianto thought with a sharp and painful stab to the core of his psyche, because Jack wasn't all that interest in _him_. Just in what he looked like and what he could do.

While he had been thinking these dark and uncomfortable thoughts, Jack had backed Ianto's body up against the worksurface-and-sink by more or less pushing him with his mouth. The onslaught of aggressive kisses slackened off as Jack finally undid Ianto's tie, staring him square in the eyes all the while that he slid the expensive silk knot apart.

_I'm in here, can't you see that's not me?_ Ianto whispered forlornly.

Jack pulled the tie off from around Ianto's bare neck in a smooth slither of iridescent red silk and wrapped it slowly around his hand, not breaking eye contact with Ianto's occupied eyes for a moment. Ianto's body flinched momently as though it was been the landing point of a fly; Ianto recognised the reaction and despaired anew.

He wasn't overly surprised to find his body shrugging off the makeshift shackles in order to offer up its wrist like a supplicant at some sort of church – he'd creased enough good ties that way – but he _was_ starting to have worried thoughts about what was doing all this in his stead; where was it getting the information from? It couldn't all just be automatic, Jack didn't tie him up _that_ often … Ianto watched Jack tie his wrists together, slow and deliberate, his eyes on Ianto's, his smirk as beguiling as ever.

Perhaps the thing was feeding on Ianto's memories. He began to feel even worse as Jack pinned Ianto's body to the wall with his hips and kissed his throat, a slow and teasing grinding motion from his pelvis into Ianto's; inside the confines of non-corporeality. Ianto though: if it's feeding on my memories it'll fool anyone. It could be some sort of chameleon. How the fuck am I going to get out of this?

Jack nipped Ianto's collarbones and gnawed and bit his way down to Ianto's belly, his hands already working at the finger-snappingly complex fastenings of his inherited suit trousers. Alone in his own mind, spectating events as though watching them on TV, Ianto sighed. _I can't believe how happy I was the first time you did that_, he said, _and now I don't want you to, you won't stop. What if it's transmitted in body fluids? What if I just … come … that black goo?_ He watched with a kind of far-off horror as Jack finally extracted his half-hard dick and got to work on it with his palms, his mouth tracing a workbook of Os on Ianto's abdomen and hair-streaked lower belly. He – the part of Ianto that was actually _him_ \- gave a miserable start. He hadn't even been aware of the onset of an erection. No sensation betrayed it, and only glimpses and vague, lingering proprieception let Ianto's conscious mind know that Jack had slipped the head of Ianto's dick into his mouth like the end of a cigar and was still absently tugging at the shaft –

_I may never, ever find that sight remotely erotic again_, Ianto groaned. He felt – although what he had left to "feel" _with_ he didn't know – panicky still, not just on Jack's behalf but on his own. Wasting time on sex – and that was a new perspective on it – could seal his fate, whatever that was to be.

Jack swallowed Ianto down further his hand between Ianto's thighs and the tip of one finger working patterns on Ianto's perineum. His hands would be uncommonly warm, Ianto knew, and his nails cut to exactly the right length to provoke shivers but no actual scratches. He _knew_ all of this, but he could feel none of it, no more than he could feel the wall at his back or the floor beneath his feet.

Ianto became acutely aware of how his body was defined by the things it encountered, the way he knew his elbow was because he knew there was a wall against it –

Jack, his lips lost in Ianto's dull black pubic hair, his index finger treading awkwardly the valley containing Ianto's arsehole, had closed his eyes and seemed quite lost to the world. Ianto's view of the scene was obliterated as his body, imitating Jack, dropped its own eyelids like terminal Venetian blinds, and all he could do was listen.

There were slobbering, suckling noises, amplified by this sudden blindness, and there was the loud and fast bass beat thump of his heart, sounding like a rave had collided with seventies night at Club X. Most of all there was the harsh and hard gasp of his breathing, which sounded like a steam locomotive making a meal of a slight incline.

_I sound stupid,_ Ianto complained to himself. _How did I never notice that before?_ His opinion was cemented by the wet half-sob that leaked from between his lips next; he could guess that Jack had stopped circumnavigating his arse and taken the plunge with his index finger.

To Ianto, disconnected from the tide of lust and rhythms of blood surging in either body, the sounds were absurd: the gulp and choke of Jack's throat struck repeatedly with the head of Ianto's dick (he was always a terrible show-off about his gag reflex or lack thereof), the gasp and rasp of Ianto's breath, behind it the growl of his empty stomach feebly reminding him that he hadn't eaten since breakfast, and the rising tempo of animal sounds sneaking from Ianto's mouth as the inevitable orgasm gathered momentum.

_Why so noisy_? Ianto thought, so preoccupied by the chorus grunts and gasps and "Ah"s that he almost forgot the bigger problem, and: _was I always this ridiculous-sounding?_

From the urgency and pitch of his breaths Ianto could tell he was – or his body was – about to let fly into Jack's mouth. He felt cold in the depths of his mind, and like he'd never been more lonely in his life. It was an absurd thought; there had been far lonelier moments: his father's funeral, or when his mother passed away. After Canary Wharf when the entire world had been without colour or meaning or value and he'd felt like a zombie. But he'd never felt so completely isolated at the very moment at which he should have felt the most connected, not until now.

Only the grunt, the gasp, the sudden flying back of his eyelids let Ianto know that his body had achieved what Jack had set out for it to reach. He watched with a kind of fastidious distaste as Jack withdrew his hand and – a moment later – his lips, a look of borderline triumph as ever on his face.

"So," Jack said after a pause in which Ianto's consciousness counted seven drips from the leaking tap and Jack untied his wrists with very steady hands, "are you _scuttling_ back off to that empty flat of yours or are you going to be staying here?"

Ianto's eyes were half-hooded as he offered a boneless, "staying here," and an obviously sated smile. Ianto's self raged impotently behind his own corneas and implored Jack to _notice something_.

Jack just kissed Ianto on the forehead, saying, "I have work to do, okay?", and left, Ianto's answering "okay" sliding off his back like rain off a duck.

Ianto's body, in the meantime, took its leave of the kitchen.

_Where the hell am I going?_ Ianto wondered as his vessel of flesh was steered by alien hands to his computer array, _and what the hell am I doing?_

Schematics, pass codes, and the encounter log flashed up on various screens, moving at a speed which Ianto's conscious mind could barely take in, his eyeballs flickering from side to side so fast that he began to fear for his ocular muscles. The information pouring out of the machine was sure to alert Jack's attention sooner or later, Ianto thought desperately – there were definitely alarm responses in place for some of the material he was accessing – but Jack did not appear, and Ianto's body remained by the computer, hitting the occasional key, until _eight in the morning_.

This was when Tosh arrived, carrying the half-eaten remains of a cinnamon Danish in a napkin with the Starbucks logo mostly concealed on it – traitor, Ianto thought half-heartedly – and a paper bag dangling from that wrist. She had pastry crumbs around her mouth and a glow in her cheeks from the cold wind outside, and she'd apparently started taking off her scarf and then forgotten to finish. "Mmpf - _Ianto_ \- " she said, swallowing her mouthful in a hurry and holding the back of her hand up to cover her mouth, " – I bought you one," she proffered the bag at her wrist, "thought you might want – "

_You bought that for Owen out of habit,_ Ianto said in the confines of his mind, but he could hear his stomach growling.

However, Ianto's body waved the Danish away with a smile and went back to studying the computer screens, leaving Tosh to wander off with a vaguely hurt gait. She was probably wondering why he hadn't got her a –

"Ianto!" Jack shouted from the general direction of the autopsy room, "COFFEE!"

\- great. Now she was going to think he'd merely been absent-minded rather than _possessed_, Ianto thought as his body immediately began the steady plod up the stairs to the coffee machine – and _that_ was a path he tried so often it might as well have been automatic piloting now.

The coffee machine was unlike any other, which may have accounted for the relative inability of anyone else at Torchwood Three to use it properly; Ianto had taken to adding anything he could salvage to it that might make it produce better coffee, frothier milk, at higher speeds to deal with the demands of his hopelessly caffeine-addicted colleagues. Now his hands, under the puppetry of whatever had control of him, yanked and shoved without care or diligence.

_Jesus, not like that,_ Ianto groaned, but the violence of the motions did not abate at all. He watched his fingernail – the ring finger on the left hand, where he'd once worn an engagement ring – catch on the rim of the drip tray and _tear off_ \- he winced reflexively within himself, despite the lack of sensation. His body ignored both the inconvenience and the rose-red, orange-bright blood dripping from his hand and carried on making coffee; within seconds his nail was whole again and the blood vanished, gone too quickly for him to be able to tell whether it had been wiped away on something or soaked back into his body via the wound.

Trapped though he was, Ianto could still smell the heavenly beans and the dark brown scent in his nostrils made his stomach roar.

The coffees stacked up on their tray, and as Gwen huffed and puffed her way into the Hub, undoing her coat, Ianto's body greeted her with The Usual as if nothing had changed. Tosh thanked him with a Danish-speckled wave as he handed her hers, but Jack – now stuck behind his paperwork mountain and looking exceptionally grumpy with it – frowned with the coffee half-way to his lips and said, "Are you _alright_?"

_No_, Ianto shouted desperately, _no I'm not, I'm stuck in here and there's some sort of parasite controlling my body! JACK! Hello?_

"You seem a bit preoccupied," Jack continued, blowing on his coffee absently.

_I'm not preoccupied, I'm possessed_, Ianto yelled.

"And _quiet_," Jack added.

Ianto's body gave Jack a rather coy smile, and raised its eyebrows, and Jack started to laugh, beginning with an ungainly, unattractive, startled snort and working his way up to genuine chuckles.

"Oh _okay_," Jack grinned, going back to his work. "_Be_ like that."

Ianto's body left and returned to the computer screens with Ianto's consciousness unleashing a vituperative avalanche of curse words aimed at his own ability for non-verbal communication.

Owen passed him with a rack of what looked like urine samples balanced atop one hand. "No, it's _not_ a delicious and nutritious breakfast, before you start," Owen growled, "it's class 7H from Cardiff High, and you don't want to _know_ the kind of looks I got in there, asking for these yesterday."

_Please notice something, Owen_, Ianto sighed.

"Fuck's sake, there's no need to look so … affronted," Owen snapped, juggling his selection of children's piss awkwardly, "it was a _joke_, okay?"

"A joke," Ianto's mouth said, a hesitant smile plucking at the corners.

"… don't know what the … what crawled up _your_ arse and died?" Owen griped, elbowing past him, pee in hand. "And don't you _dare_ say 'Jack'," he added over his shoulder, "or I will _find_ a way to be sick."

_Yes!_ Ianto shouted, momently ecstatic as Owen vanished. _Now tell someone I'm being weird! Come on, Owen! Don't let me down!_

There was a crash from the autopsy room, followed by an extremely loud swear word and the sound of something else falling over, which was in turn followed by, "Jesus, I'm covered in fucking _piss!_ Who left that fucking table there?"

It seemed quite likely that Owen was going to be far more interested in his own misery than in a little weirdness on Ianto's part, and Ianto's hope-inflated conscious mind was already going down when Owen added in an aggrieved yell of the kind at which he was so very, very good, "I think I can salvage so- IANTO, get in here and help."

Ordinarily Ianto would have pulled a face at the prospect of having to ring piss out of a dead man's clothes – it seemed like the absolute antithesis of a good time – but his body trotted off compliantly enough.

Crouching beside Owen on the tiled floor, Ianto's body picked up a pipette and began imitating the delicate squeezing and suction - they were both awkward, Owen with his dead, broken fingers and Ianto's body taking its cue wholly from Owen. "Sucking up kids' wee off the floor with a grinning tea boy," Owen sighed, "Fantastic. That's how my day _starts_. How much weirder are things going to get – "

There was a long pause, and Owen gave Ianto a very suspicious look; Ianto knew why – it was a staple of their interaction nowadays that Ianto would respond to such statements with "… for a dead man", but apparently the thing in Ianto's body didn't have this piece of information, or couldn't articulate it. Ianto's body had, in the meantime, frozen at its task. Ianto wondered if the thing, the parasite or possessor, was trying out and discarding appropriate phrases gleaned from Owen's speech.

"Everything alright?" Tosh asked, appearing like a herald of hope at the top of the stairs, coffee still firmly in hand. "D'you two need – on second thoughts, maybe not …"

"Ianto's being weird," Owen said bluntly, standing up and moving away from where Ianto's body squatted, pipette of piss promptly forgotten. Ianto could have turned a cartwheel in his own head. _FINALLY_. Ianto's body, on the other hand, got up and brushed down its suit with a painfully ingrained gesture – Ianto saw Tosh look confused – and a quizzical smile.

"That's because it's not Ianto," Jack said in a grim voice from over Tosh's shoulder.

Ianto's second _FINALLY_ of relief died on his figurative lips as he spotted the service revolver in Jack's hand levelled directly at him.

_What – no – NO JACK NO!_

"Er … it looks sort of a lot like him," Tosh ventured uncertainly, but Jack's hand did not waver.

"Ianto?" Jack asked. "Are you in there?"

_YES_, Ianto shouted to no avail, _I'M IN HERE AND THAT'S STILL MY BODY YOU'RE AIMING THAT AT, DON'T FUCKING SHOOT ME!_

His lips remained pursed in a puzzled smile.

Jack shot him.

Ianto's body staggered at the impact, but did not fall. Ianto was expecting a crash; he was expecting the terrible darkness that Owen had muttered about to follow the harsh cough of the gun, but instead his eyes remained open and, after a second or so of gaping mouths from Tosh and Owe (and Gwen, there, coming in late as ever) and grim vindication from Jack – something metallic tinkled on the tiled floor. Ianto supposed it must be the bullet.

"Thought so," Jack said, looking disgusted as he reholstered his revolver.

_What just happened?_ Ianto implored. _What has it done to me? What happened? JACK! What happened?_

"We're going to have to stick him – it – in the cells for now," Jack went on. "Owen, Tosh – look up everything we've got on parasites, shape-shifters, and mimics. Gwen, run a trace – actually, forget that. No. Just go round to his flat and see if he's _there_?"

_I'm here,_ Ianto said. _HERE_.

Jack bounded down the steps and grabbed Ianto's arm. "Well? Why are you all standing around? Get on with it." He closed his hand tightly around Ianto's wrist and tugged on it. "Come now."

Ianto's body obeyed as obediently as a trained sheepdog – the thing evidently didn't understand entirely what Jack had been talking about – and as the rest of the team dispersed, shooting worried, curious looks back at Ianto as they went, Ianto's unresisting body went _up_ the autopsy room stairs, guided by a sharp hand on his elbow.

* * *

 

The relief Ianto felt at not being left alone in the cells was almost like a tidal wave. It was somewhat tempered by the fact that Jack's presence was quite a hostile one; he stared at Ianto through the Perspex and very pointedly checked his gun, as though the alien inhabiting Ianto's body would know what a 1941 service revolver was or even associate it with the injury it had healed earlier. Sometimes Ianto thought Jack put far too much emphasis on the universality of weapons.

Janet cowered in the far corner of her cell, only served to convince Jack that something was quite seriously _up_, and he didn't seem to notice her nostrils distending like coal pits in her face.

"What are you?" Jack snapped.

"You," Ianto's mouth said. Under the right circumstances it might have sounded poignant or meaningful, but now it seemed hollow, exposed for what it was – the meaningless parroting of an alien presence.

_It can't answer, Jack,_ Ianto muttered, _it doesn't know how._

"What. Are. You," Jack repeated stonily, "and what have you done to Ianto?"

"Ianto," the voice that sounded the same as Ianto's said, as though Jack was being entirely reasonable.

"The person you're imitating," Jack snarled, "is a member of my team, and if I don't get him back unharmed you're in _deep shit_."

Ianto snorted internally, because there really were times when Jack was doing his chest-beating alpha male bit when that was the only reasonable response; Jack glared through the Perspex at Ianto's unmoving body.

"What do you want here?" Jack growled, his eyes boring into Ianto like diamond-tipped drills. "Answer me!" he shouted, slamming the heels of his hands into the Perspex. It was an intimidation technique Jack used quite often, usually on more nervous prisoners, but Ianto's body merely blinked reflexively and twitched in the pale imitation of a flinch. "You talked just fine last night," Jack said, pointing at Ianto's face. "But I _know_ that wasn't him."

_Then why didn't you do something earlier?_ Ianto moaned, _Why did you keep fucking me if you knew it wasn't really me? Why didn't you - _

"Last night …" said Ianto's mouth.

Jack frowned. "Yes?"

"Yes," Ianto's body said emphatically, nodding.

"… what?" Jack's forehead puckered like a stick had poked into it suddenly. "_Can_ you talk?"

"Can talk," Ianto's mouth said earnestly, smiling again. Ianto saw his fingers flex and wondered what they were doing. There was some tension in his body – even in his locked-away mental cage Ianto could feel it, feel the intent to action.

"Then _answer me_," Jack said sharply. "Why are you here? What are you? What have you done to Ianto?"

"Ianto. Here," Ianto's voice said, and his arm whipped out, smashing his fist against the Perspex next to the air-holes.

It was done with such speed and force that the blow might easily have cracked or even shattered a lesser thickness of divider. However, the cell window was extremely thick, and so what cracked were most of the bones in Ianto's right hand.

_Jesus fucking Christ that was my hand!_ Ianto screamed inside his own head, temporarily too shocked and angry to remember what he'd observed by the coffee machine.

He watched, as Jack watched, the blood from his extended fist fade back into his skin in beads, the shattered fragments of bone rearranging themselves under his skin like maggots moving under the skin of roadkill, black patches like ink on watercolour paper flaring outwards and shrinking back in over the blood that drew itself back. When the process was done – it took only a handful or so of seconds – Ianto's hand flexed itself again, demonstrating clearly the perfect and fluid movement of each joint for Jack's edification.

Recognition and realisation bloomed on Jack's face. "_You're_ \- you're in Ianto's body. That's him, there. You're in his tissues."

_FINALLY_, Ianto shouted for a third time. _Help me, Jack! HELP ME!_

"What have you done with his mind?" Jack asked, his voice low. He looked a little pale, and muttered under his breath, "this is disgusting," which was a new one on Ianto. Jack Harkness, universal anomaly, was usually revolted by absolutely nothing, up to and including sex with sentient mould; Ianto had seen the slides and had nightmares for a week. He'd also felt a quite powerful urge to disinfect his own retinas.

"What _are_ you?" Jack asked again, a little less aggressively this time.

"You," Ianto's mouth repeated, a little frantic-sounding.

"Huh," Jack said. He appeared to be thinking, although as Ianto had learnt to his cost and occasional benefit, this _did_ often mean that Jack merely appeared, and was in actual fact asleep. "Okay. Are you a parasitic organism? Yes or no?"

Ianto sighed. Why assume that the thing knew what a parasite was? Or that it was even sentient and not just working entirely on instinct?

"Yes," said Ianto's mouth. "Organism."

"Where – " Jack began.

"Okay," Ianto's mouth interrupted. "Parasitic, yes. Okay. Parasitic. Okay organism, yes? Organism yes?" His voice was suddenly desperate, as if the thing had only just figured out the emotional significance of the tone of voice.

"No," Jack said in a flat, leaden voice. "_Not_ okay."

"Not okay?" Ianto's mouth repeated.

"That body you're in," Jack said, pointing with his first two fingers, "it's – he's – one of my team."

"Team?"

"He's _mine_," Jack said, fierce and firm, as though a tiger had somehow become a primary school teacher. "Mine." He had his eyes on Ianto's, unblinking and intense, and for a moment Ianto thought he could see right into Ianto's head, see his mind caught there like wool on barbed wire.

_We're going to be having words about that_, Ianto said, but the strange conversation of anger and echo went on without him.

"Mine," Ianto's mouth mumbled, backing slowly away from the clear dividing walls.

"No," Jack said, voice of a dog trainer now. "_Mine_."

It was a tug of war, Ianto realised, a battle of wills, and one which Jack could not conceivably hope to win. The thing, the parasite, stood to lose so much more than Jack's mere teammate and occasional fuck. Ianto had no idea how he knew this, but he knew the thing's desperation to retain its hold on his body as intimately and immediately as he knew his own frantic desire to have himself back in control; it was sudden as a switch being tripped.

"Mineminemineminemineminemine…" droned Ianto's voice, and the monstrous flatness of it was somehow more disturbing than the hysteria of before; if Ianto had been in control of his own hackles, they would have risen, and he was sure Jack's gaze flickered with cold discomfort at the sound of it. "Minemineminemineminemineminemine…"

It was horrible, but nothing like as unnerving as what Ianto's alien-puppeted body did next.

Moving at a hideous pace, with agility and confidence Ianto knew he didn't possess, his body began hurling itself at the Perspex again and again, without even an attempt at protecting a single delicate bit of himself.

_STOP THAT FUCK'S SAKE STOP IT_, Ianto shouted, but as before the parasite paid no attention. He was helpless, as helpless as if he'd been stretched out on a rack, unable to do anything but watch and listen as his body crashed into the unyielding surface like a thrown rock.

Again, and again, and again. He could hear the cracks and crunches of bones breaking and resetting, the sound of cartilage grating and re-padding itself, and for the first time Ianto realised that he needed the ability to be physically sick in order to right his mental state. Vomiting, nausea, would have freed him from the sense of dread and revulsion and despair at seeing and hearing his own body destroyed so emphatically.

The _bangs_ and _thuds_ as Ianto's body bounced around the cell like a moth in a too-small jar became regular – the momentum carrying him back and forth without much effort on the part of the parasite – and as he hurtled past at a dizzying speed, bones resetting themselves in his collar like a mosaic shaken into place, Ianto thought he caught a look on Jack's face, but he was whirled away too quickly to identify it.

"_Cut that the fuck out,_" Jack hissed.

The parasite banged Ianto repeatedly off the back wall and let him slump against the floor, healing, falling so suddenly that it was as though a camera had been dropped – Ianto's sense of direction remained convinced that he was still upright and the world seemed strange and hallucinogenic.

"You can't have him," Jack said, lacing his fingers through the airholes and staring intently at Ianto's fallen body. "You're burning him out. You get the hell out of his body before you use it all up."

The fear that gripped Ianto's consciousness at this notion was indescribable.

"Get. Out. Of him," Jack suggested, his fingertips pressed against the _inside_ of the Perspex, knuckles curved awkwardly within the clear tubes that bored through the dense plastic.

_Jack, move your hands_, Ianto said, aware again of the tension in his own separate body, like the coming of a sneeze. _Move them!_

But it was too late, even if his warning _could_ be heard. Ianto's body jerked upright at speed and smashed headlong into the outer wall of the cell like a wrecking ball made flesh. There were several nasty cracks like brittle twigs snapping in a bed of leaf moult, the wetness just audible in the crunch; Ianto knew he'd broken more of his own bones, but the shout of sudden and acute pain told him that Jack had just had his fingers pretty effectively broken too.

"SHIT," Jack muttered, examining his smashed fingers on the safe side of the wall with a rictus of agony distorting his face.

"Shshshshshshshshshs," Ianto's mouth hissed. It sounded calm, maybe even a little joyful, and to Ianto's mind it was sinister as anything he could imagine or remember. "Mineminemine," Ianto's mouth added.

Jack froze. Ianto's mind lurched unpleasantly at this new development.

The thing had learnt a new trick.

Clumsily, using the back of his hand, Jack smacked his ear-piece on. He kept his eyes trained on Ianto as though they were the sights of some weapons system. "Guys, I need everyone back down here to get him out of the cells. Things have taken a _turn_."

_What a subtle way of saying 'I have just made everything worse,'_ Ianto groused.

"I've _got_ it, yeah," Jack added in response to something Ianto couldn't hear. "He's in there. Tosh, I'm going to need you to set up the Mind Probe. We're going to haul him back out of his own head."

_Oh God no,_ Ianto said weakly as Jack regarded his possessed body with determination and a deal of lingering pain. _I'm going to die. I'm really actually going to die._

* * *

 

Half an hour later, strapped tightly to the chair, his mouth stilling hissing, "mineminemineminmine" like a skipping CD, Ianto wasn't inclined to revise his position. It had taken a great deal of effort to get him there, fracturing one of Owen's ribs ("good thing I don't need to breathe, because that's gone right into my lung.") and cracking Jack's left wrist. Fortunately Tosh and Gwen managed to escape with nothing more serious than bruises and in the latter's case a nosebleed, but Ianto could still feel the guilt more intensely than a forest fire on his brain.

"Ready?" Jack asked, cradling his fucked up fingers around each other. His face was pale and sweat seemed to have sprung up on every visible area of skin from the effort of suppressing the pain. His nostrils flared. He was probably addressing Tosh, but as she was stood behind Ianto's head it was impossible for him to see her expression.

Owen's incredulous expression was, however, very much visible, as was Gwen's of deep concern.

"We could really hurt him," she protested, holding a bloody tissue just above her mouth – which muffled the intensity somewhat. "This process isn't safe at all – exploding _heads_, people having sleeper organisms activated – the _pain_ he'll have to go through – "

"Do you have a better idea?" Jack asked in uncharacteristically clipped tones. "Believe me, I don't want to put Ianto in danger anymore than you do – probably even _less_, in fact – but if we can't flush that thing out of him it will have killed him in a month, maybe less."

"_What_?" Tosh asked.

_Yes_, Ianto agreed. _What?_

"I know what that is," Jack said. "I didn't need to check the energy signature it left on the Rift Activity records after all. I've seen one before, in … it was a long time away and several galaxies ago. In a war. They're useful. Mindless parasites that take survival information from the memories of sentient hosts; they used them, in this war, to make canonfodder. I'm sure you can all imagine – "

Ianto could imagine only too well.

"- they have a short life-cycle. They don't allow the host to feed, and they don't allow it to sleep. Eventually the body just burns out from the continual activity, the – the organism releases its spores, and the body rots, leaving the spores to disperse." Jack shook his head. He ought to have had his arms folded – Ianto knew the expression on his face – but the pain from his fingers meant he could only hold his hands in front of him, limp around each other, and wince between words. "Just … mindless life. Barely aware of anything other than the fact that it lives, and that it must reproduce."

Owen made a face. "Ianto's been possessed by fungus? He's got a really malignant _fungal infection_, is that what you're saying?"

"No, that's not what I'm saying," Jack said impatiently, "what I'm saying is _get on with getting his mind back, Tosh_."

_If it's just mindless life,_ Ianto said, hearing clanks and tapping behind him, _why did it have me staring at schematics all night? Why would it have me absorbing information like that?_

"Alright," Tosh said after a while, "I'm going to initialise – "

"Why can't you just say 'start'?" Owen complained. "Starting! That's all you're doing!"

_Good old Torchwood,_ Ianto said in the kind of snippy tone he wouldn't have been able to use had they been able to hear him, _bickering while they're killing me. This thing isn't going to let go without a fight. You don't know how badly it wants to live. It wants to live so much more badly than Owen does. More than I do. More than any of us - _

"Alright, I'm _starting_ the first layer probe – " Tosh said, and Ianto could hear the unsaid 'for the benefit of Dr Harper and Dr Harper's pedantry' as clearly as if it _had_ been said.

"Skip it," Jack said, waving his hand dismissively. He winced and swore as the movement quite clearly sent new waves of pain through him. "We need to get right down to core back consciousness."

"Without going through the rest of the layers?" Tosh asked. It was her _you cannot possibly be serious_ voice, for use on Jack when Jack was asking the impossible of technology. Ianto – and the rest of the team – knew it very well.

"_Yes_ without going through the rest of the layers, do you want to give it a direct path to – "

"This is insane," Owen's muttering interrupted Jack's explanation in the bid for Ianto's attention, largely because it sounded a lot like common sense. "The mind is a _conceptual construct_. It doesn't physically exist! How the hell are you – how do you even know it's still in there?"

Jack was ignoring him. " – distortion trail," he said, quite angrily. "NOW DO IT."

Ianto felt the wall of fire coming; it was like a sudden light had flourished in the emptiness of his mind, like someone had lit underneath his conscious thought a huge sign reading, "this way out". It was easy. All he had to do was rush into the fibres of his own body again, surging through the neurons, skipping through the chemical structures of himself, reabsorbing his body – in that moment, Ianto was more enlightened than he'd ever been. He knew himself, every atom, perfect and _his_.

Ianto rushed towards himself, and the shadows rushed towards Ianto.

The next thing he heard was himself screaming and the next thing he smelt was his own flesh smoking; the next thing he heard after _that_ was Jack shouting, "TURN IT OFF!"

There was a click and the pain began to subside.

"Ianto?" Jack asked. Ianto found it impossible to focus on anything much, so he seemed more like a blur of concern than a person. "Ianto, can you hear me? Are you okay?"

"_Fucking hell that really hurts,_" Ianto whimpered. He could, at last, hear his own voice coming out of his own mouth and saying the words he actually wanted to say. "Oh my god. Ow. Ow. Let me out of this thing, I'm going to throw up."

Gwen hastened to unstrap him, and the minute she had he did as he had predicted, flopping at the waist and spitting a foul-tasting string of bilious yellow drool onto the floor.

"Sorry about that," he muttered, but everyone was smiling at him.

"Are you okay?" Gwen asked, grabbing his shoulders and hugging him, apparently oblivious to the vomit smell and the odour of singed Ianto that accompanied it. "Are you okay?"

"That thing _really_ … fucking … _hurts_," Ianto reiterated, accepting the hug gratefully. "Oh god I never want to do that again."

"With any luck you won't have to," Jack said, hanging back.

"I am so, so sorry," Ianto said, his words muffled by Gwen's shoulder. "I couldn't – "

"I know," Jack said. "I know."

"But he's alright now?" Owen asked. "He's all – he's all Ianto?"

"I guess so," Jack said. "And, Dr Harper – " he held up his hands and Ianto made a face as the fingers stuck out at strange angles. "- you have some bonesetting to do."

* * *

 

Later, when Jack and Ianto alone were left in the Hub, Jack said, "Are you going to stay here tonight?"

Ianto shook his head. "Unless you think I need to. I need to sleep."

"You could sleep here." Jack looked faintly ridiculous with all his fingers splinted and bandaged, only his thumbs protruding unbroken, his wrist in a cast.

"What are you going to do, Tutankhamun, with your hands like that?" Ianto smirked. It was one of Jack's smirks. He'd picked it up and found it fitted unpleasantly well on him.

"I did mean sleep," Jack said, shrugging. "But now that you mention it there are quite a _lot_ of things I can do like this." He waggled his eyebrows.

"I bet," Ianto said. "But no."

Most of all what he wanted was to go home, eat a whole sixteen inch pizza _on his own_, and sleep for the next twenty hours or so.

Jack patted him on the back with his elbow. "Go on, then. I'll just have to sit here and watch my hands heal."

Ianto went; he was half-way across Plas Roald Dahl when the sound of his own footsteps echoing in his ears failed to mask any longer the slow, oil-seeping slipperiness of information ebbing through his brain without him even so much as trying to move it.

Under the light of a cloud-wreathed moon, one stubborn star and several sickly street-lamps, Ianto Jones stared down at his hands and watched the blackness bloom beneath his fingertips; perhaps no one else could see it anymore, but he knew it was still there, and that it knew him, now.


End file.
